Paul E Peterson
Biographic Data
| ID | 79835 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul E Peterson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul E |
| FAMILY NAME | Peterson |
| SIGNATURE | PETERSON P E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8073-5186 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 72 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 371 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1967 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Social Capital, Families, Friendships, and Inter-generational Mobility
Social capital generated by relationships within families has a greater impact on inter-generational mobility in the United States than other forms, though community capital plays a secondary role, and student achievement and school and adult friendships serve as moderators. County-level mobility rates are regressed on county-level indexes of the four forms of social capital, student achievement, demographic controls, and state fixed effects. Est…
The Efficiency-Equity Trade-off in a Federal System
Federalism theorists debate the desirability of funding local services from local revenues or inter-governmental grants. Tiebout expects efficiency gains from local funding, but Oates says it perpetuates inequalities. Research using data from national probability samples has yet to show whether efficiency-equity trade-offs are associated with funding sources. We describe the trade-off in education by estimating the effect of revenue share from lo…
Experimentally Estimated Impacts of School Vouchers on Educational Attainments of Moderately and Severely Disadvantaged Students
For decades, social theorists have posited-and descriptive accounts have shown-that students isolated by both social class and ethnicity suffer extreme deprivations that limit the effectiveness of equal-opportunity interventions. Even educational programs that yield positive results for moderately disadvantaged students may not prove beneficial for those who possess less of the economic, social, and cultural capital that play a critical role in i…
Experimental Estimates of Impacts of Cost-Earnings Information on Adult Aspirations for Children’s Postsecondary Education
Economic information may close aspiration disparities for postsecondary education across socioeconomic, ethnic, and partisan divides. In 2017, we estimated impacts of information on such disparities by means of a survey experiment administered to a nationally representative sample of 4,214 adults. A baseline group was asked whether they preferred a 4-year degree, a 2-year degree, or no further education for their oldest child younger than the age…
Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest
As federal funding for public broadcasting wanes and support from corporations and an elite group of viewers and listeners rises, public broadcasting's role as vox populi has come under threat. With contributions from key scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, this volume examines the crisis facing public broadcasting today by analyzing the institution's development, its presentday operations, and its prospects for the future. Covering ever…
Coming Class War and How to Avoid It
Relative Performance Information and Perceptions of Public Service Quality
The publication of information about public service performance has expanded dramatically in recent decades. Multiple experiments have shown that relative performance information influences citizens’ evaluations of local services. It is unclear whether this information leads citizens to update their beliefs or temporarily employ different criteria, however, and we do not know if the influence of performance information will extend to contexts in …
New Empirical Analysis in the Economics of Education
Research in the economics of education has expanded rapidly all over the world in recent years. Scholars have not only inquired into an array of novel topics but they have become increasingly aware of methodological challenges posed by endogenous relationships among the variables of interest. A leading example is research on school choice, because choice necessarily implies selection and the variables that influence selection may be fundamentally…
The Case for Curriculum-Based, External Examinations That Have Significant Consequences for Students
State-mandated systems of comprehensive examinations to be taken prior to high school graduation would focus the attention of students in high school, motivate them to higher levels of performance, provide guidance to teachers as to the appropriate material to be covered, and reduce antieducational pressures within peer groups, all of whose members would share a common objective
The Efficacy of Choice Threats within School Accountability Systems
Targeted stigma and school voucher threats under a revised 2002 Florida accountability law have positive impacts on school performance as measured by the test score gains of their students. In contrast, stigma and public school choice threats under the US federal accountability law, No Child Left Behind, do not have similar effects in Florida. Estimation relies upon individual-level data and is based upon regression analyses that exploit disconti…
Participation in a national, means-tested school voucher program
We use data from a sample of applicants to a national means-tested school voucher program and a national sample of the population eligible for the program to evaluate the factors leading families to use school vouchers. Our analysis divides the process of voucher usage into two distinct stages: initial application and subsequent take-up. Using a nested logit model, we find that some factors, like religious affiliation and religious service attend…
Our Schools and Our Future … Are We Still at Risk
Our Schools and Our Future ...Are We Still at Risk?, edited by Paul E. Peterson. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2003. 378 pp. $15.00, paperback; $25.00, hardback. In 2004 we are acknowledging the anniversary of two major civil rights and education milestones; one being the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling and the other is the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In light of these recognitions, we co…
Efficiency, Bias, and Classification Schemes
When estimating voucher impacts on test scores in the New York City randomized field trial (RFT) for African Americans (defined either by mother's ethnicity, parental caretaker, mother and father's ethnicity, or mother or father's ethnicity), results remain significantly positive, even when models include students for whom no baseline test scores are available. These results obtain as long as one estimates impacts precisely by controlling for bas…
Uses of Theory in Randomized Field Trials
By design, randomized field trials (RFTs) avoid many of the problems that plague observational studies, foremost among them being the introduction of selection biases. In practice, however, RFTs regularly confront other difficulties, such as chance differences between treatment and control groups and attrition from the study. To address these issues, baseline data on the variable of primary interest are essential. Theory also aids the analytic pr…
The Education Gap
While the merits of vouchers have been the subject of intense public debate in recent years, there has been very little available evidence upon which to gauge their efficacy. The first publicly funded voucher plan involving private schools wasn't established until 1990 in Milwaukee; before then, the only data on school choice came from a small, poorly designed program in California. Voucher programs grew dramatically in the latter half of the 199…
Impact of School Voucher Research
In an article otherwise lamenting political scientists' inability to influence public policy (“Politics, Political Science, and Specialization,” June 2002, pp. 187–190), Robert Jervis takes issue with recent research on school vouchers, to which we have contributed (2002). Jervis argues that voucher experiments “are largely irrelevant, or at best a first step.” Comparisons of students in private and public schools are of little value as long as m…
School vouchers and academic performance
This article examines the effects of school vouchers on student test scores in New York, New York, Dayton, Ohio, and Washington, DC. The evaluations in all three cities are designed as randomized field trials. The findings, therefore, are not confounded by the self‐selection problems that pervade most observational data. After 2 years, African Americans who switched from public to private school gained, relative to their public‐school peers, an a…
If the Peer Review Attack Fails, Attack Something Else
Should Public Discussion of Political Science Research Be Controlled? Why Interest Group Recommendations on the Proper Procedures for Reporting Research Should Be Treated with Skepticism
Jay P. Greene, Paul E. Peterson, Should Public Discussion of Political Science Research Be Controlled? Why Interest Group Recommendations on the Proper Procedures for Reporting Research Should Be Treated with Skepticism, PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 220-224
Effectiveness of School Choice
Interstate Competition and Welfare Policy
In 1996, the federal government terminated the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program and replaced it with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF). Many powers once held by the federal government are now being used by state governments. Will welfare assistance be redesigned and expanded or will states "race to the bottom?" This issue is investigated by examining state welfare policy choices during the latter yea…
Federalism Reconsidered and Revitalized
Classifying by Race
The contemporary debate over racial classification has been dominated by fringe voices in American society. The right demands that history should be abrogated and public policy made colour-blind, whilst the left insists that all customs, languages, institutions and practices are racially tinged and that only aggressive, colour-conscious programmes can reverse the course of American history. These essays, however, recognize that racial classificat…
Foreword to The Study of Educational Politics
"Targeting Within Universalism
American Federalism, Welfare Policy, and Residential Choices
The relationship between welfare benefit levels and the residential choices of the poor raises two issues for federalism in the United States. Do state benefit levels affect the residential choices of the poor? Do residential choices of the poor affect the level at which a state sets its benefit levels? Empirical studies have seldom studied the interconnection between these two issues. This research estimates simultaneously the mutual effects of …
Relative Performance Information and Perceptions of Public Service Quality
The publication of information about public service performance has expanded dramatically in recent decades. Multiple experiments have shown that relative performance information influences citizens’ evaluations of local services. It is unclear whether this information leads citizens to update their beliefs or temporarily employ different criteria, however, and we do not know if the influence of performance information will extend to contexts in …
Interstate Competition and Welfare Policy
In 1996, the federal government terminated the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program and replaced it with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF). Many powers once held by the federal government are now being used by state governments. Will welfare assistance be redesigned and expanded or will states "race to the bottom?" This issue is investigated by examining state welfare policy choices during the latter yea…
The Rise of the Entrepreneurial State
Rise of the Entrepreneurial State charts the development of state and local government initiatives to influence the market and strengthen economic development policies. This trend marked a decisive break from governments' traditionally small role in the affairs of private industry that defined the relationship between the public and private sector for the first half of the twentieth century. The turn to state and local government intervention sig…
Forms of Representation
Debate over representation has been a continuing part of the Western political tradition at least since the writings of Hobbes. Recently, Hanna Pitkin, using the tools of linguistic analysis, has clarified, if not resolved, the debate by examining the disparate uses of the term in both political and non-political discourse. In order to elucidate the issues, she discussed such different forms of representation as formal representation, descriptive…
Effectiveness of School Choice
School vouchers and academic performance
This article examines the effects of school vouchers on student test scores in New York, New York, Dayton, Ohio, and Washington, DC. The evaluations in all three cities are designed as randomized field trials. The findings, therefore, are not confounded by the self‐selection problems that pervade most observational data. After 2 years, African Americans who switched from public to private school gained, relative to their public‐school peers, an a…
When Federalism Works
Twenty years ago cooperative federalism, in the form of federal grant-in-aid programs administered by state and local governments, was applauded almost without reservation as the best means of helping the handicapped, the educationally disadvantaged, the poor, and other groups with special needs. More recently these same programs have been criticized for excessive regulations and red tape, bureaucratic ineptitude, and high cost. The criticisms ha…
Participation in a national, means-tested school voucher program
We use data from a sample of applicants to a national means-tested school voucher program and a national sample of the population eligible for the program to evaluate the factors leading families to use school vouchers. Our analysis divides the process of voucher usage into two distinct stages: initial application and subsequent take-up. Using a nested logit model, we find that some factors, like religious affiliation and religious service attend…
The President's Dominance in Foreign Policy Making
A Unitary Model of Local Taxation and Expenditure Policies in the United States
Two models of local policy formation can be set forth. Although they are complementary rather than competing models, for heuristic purposes it is useful to present them as contrasting approaches. Since the first, the bargaining model, is well known, I shall concentrate in this paper on elaborating and applying a second, unitary model of policy making. The paper is divided into four main parts. After briefly identifying the limitations of the barg…
Efficiency, Bias, and Classification Schemes
When estimating voucher impacts on test scores in the New York City randomized field trial (RFT) for African Americans (defined either by mother's ethnicity, parental caretaker, mother and father's ethnicity, or mother or father's ethnicity), results remain significantly positive, even when models include students for whom no baseline test scores are available. These results obtain as long as one estimates impacts precisely by controlling for bas…
Presidential Assassination
The Efficacy of Choice Threats within School Accountability Systems
Targeted stigma and school voucher threats under a revised 2002 Florida accountability law have positive impacts on school performance as measured by the test score gains of their students. In contrast, stigma and public school choice threats under the US federal accountability law, No Child Left Behind, do not have similar effects in Florida. Estimation relies upon individual-level data and is based upon regression analyses that exploit disconti…
Uses of Theory in Randomized Field Trials
By design, randomized field trials (RFTs) avoid many of the problems that plague observational studies, foremost among them being the introduction of selection biases. In practice, however, RFTs regularly confront other difficulties, such as chance differences between treatment and control groups and attrition from the study. To address these issues, baseline data on the variable of primary interest are essential. Theory also aids the analytic pr…
The Urban Underclass and the Poverty Paradox
The urban underclass is at once a characterization of a fragment of American society, a statement about the interconnections among diverse social problems, and an attempt to theorize about the paradox of poverty in an affluent society. The term is powerful because it calls attention to the conjunction between the characters of individuals and the impersonal forces of the larger social and political order. Class is the least interesting half of th…
Why Executive-Legislative Conflict in the United States is Dwindling
An examination of executive-legislative conflict occurring in US congressional committees between 1947 and 1990 reveals that, despite current concerns of gridlock, the overall level of conflict declined during this period. There are two structural sources of inter-branch conflict – constituent and partisan. The constituent basis for conflict in the United States is rooted in the differing manner in which members of the two branches are elected. B…
The New Politics of Deficits
The Reagan administration's fiscal policies represent the boldest, yet most problematic, of all its efforts to transform the domestic agenda. By tolerating deficits on a scale unprecedented in peacetime history, the administration has been able to pursue simultaneously its commitment to a stronger defense and its pledge to cut the federal income tax rate. By tolerating these deficits, it has been able to create an austere political climate in whi…
Experimental Estimates of Impacts of Cost-Earnings Information on Adult Aspirations for Children’s Postsecondary Education
Economic information may close aspiration disparities for postsecondary education across socioeconomic, ethnic, and partisan divides. In 2017, we estimated impacts of information on such disparities by means of a survey experiment administered to a nationally representative sample of 4,214 adults. A baseline group was asked whether they preferred a 4-year degree, a 2-year degree, or no further education for their oldest child younger than the age…
L'urban underclass chez les sociologues américains
Herpin Nicolas. L'urban underclass chez les sociologues américains. Exclusion sociale et pauvreté. In: Revue française de sociologie, 1993, 34-3. pp. 421-439
British Interest Group Theory Reexamined
Fashions popular in the study of American politics are quickly transported-with modifications, of course-to the British scene.l Thus, the spurt of investigations into interest group activity in the United States2 was followed in the mid-fifties by several volumes and papers on British interest groups.3 The works of Harry Eckstein and Samuel H. Beer are undoubtedly the most theoretically oriented, analytically significant, and influential of these…
The Rise and Fall of Special Interest Politics
Journal Article The Rise and Fall of Special Interest Politics Get access Paul E. Peterson Paul E. Peterson PAUL E. PETERSON is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University and director of the University's Center for American Political Studies. Among his recent publications are Welfare Magnets: A New Case of a National Standard (co-author). Can the Government Govern? (co-editor), and The Urban Underclass (co-editor). Searc…
Does Urban Reform Imply Class Conflict? The Case of Atlanta's Schools
THOUGH THE PRESSURES FOR CHANGE had been building for some time, reform came suddenly to the Atlanta public school system. On May 28, 1897, in a City Council meeting ostensibly called to consider some routine matters pertaining to the city's water works, Alderman James G. Woodward introduced a resolution which replaced the sitting seventeen-member school board with a new board comprising one member from each of the city's seven wards. Despite a r…
Experimentally Estimated Impacts of School Vouchers on Educational Attainments of Moderately and Severely Disadvantaged Students
For decades, social theorists have posited-and descriptive accounts have shown-that students isolated by both social class and ethnicity suffer extreme deprivations that limit the effectiveness of equal-opportunity interventions. Even educational programs that yield positive results for moderately disadvantaged students may not prove beneficial for those who possess less of the economic, social, and cultural capital that play a critical role in i…
Political Parties and Citizen Participation in English City Politics
Political parties have come to play a critical role in contemporary theories of democracy. In order to achieve a system where voters regularly influence the authoritative actions of policymakers, it is said that the system of recruitment to political office must be organized so that stable competition between organized political factions occurs. V.O. Key, whose careful analysis of Southern Politics convinced him of the evils that thrived where po…
Historical particularities and concept formation
Presidential Assassination
The Political World of the High School Teacher. Harmon Zeigler The Political Life of American Teachers. Harmon Zeigler
Dilemmas of Social Reform
Forms of Representation
Debate over representation has been a continuing part of the Western political tradition at least since the writings of Hobbes. Recently, Hanna Pitkin, using the tools of linguistic analysis, has clarified, if not resolved, the debate by examining the disparate uses of the term in both political and non-political discourse. In order to elucidate the issues, she discussed such different forms of representation as formal representation, descriptive…
British Interest Group Theory Reexamined
Fashions popular in the study of American politics are quickly transported-with modifications, of course-to the British scene.l Thus, the spurt of investigations into interest group activity in the United States2 was followed in the mid-fifties by several volumes and papers on British interest groups.3 The works of Harry Eckstein and Samuel H. Beer are undoubtedly the most theoretically oriented, analytically significant, and influential of these…
Race and authority in urban politics
The Politics of Expertise . Guy Benveniste
The Political Web of American Schools. Frederick M. Wirt , Michael W. Kirst
After Word
Race and Authority in Urban Politics
School Politics Chicago Style
School Politics Chicago Style
The Political Mind and the Political Environment. W. Lance Bennett
Political Parties and Citizen Participation in English City Politics
Political parties have come to play a critical role in contemporary theories of democracy. In order to achieve a system where voters regularly influence the authoritative actions of policymakers, it is said that the system of recruitment to political office must be organized so that stable competition between organized political factions occurs. V.O. Key, whose careful analysis of Southern Politics convinced him of the evils that thrived where po…
Does It Really Matter?-Educational Policy Research Carries on
The Politics of Education
Organizational Imperatives and Ideological Change
Two theories of ideological change predominate in popular and social science literatures. The first takes the interests of social groups as decisive, the second understands ideologies as expressions of societal values or cultures. Neither allows much scope for existing political elites, who exercise considerable influence over political discourse. The utility of incorporating organizational needs of political elites into explanations of ideologic…
A Unitary Model of Local Taxation and Expenditure Policies in the United States
Two models of local policy formation can be set forth. Although they are complementary rather than competing models, for heuristic purposes it is useful to present them as contrasting approaches. Since the first, the bargaining model, is well known, I shall concentrate in this paper on elaborating and applying a second, unitary model of policy making. The paper is divided into four main parts. After briefly identifying the limitations of the barg…
City Limits
Washington's Election in Chicago
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City Limits
Does Urban Reform Imply Class Conflict? The Case of Atlanta's Schools
THOUGH THE PRESSURES FOR CHANGE had been building for some time, reform came suddenly to the Atlanta public school system. On May 28, 1897, in a City Council meeting ostensibly called to consider some routine matters pertaining to the city's water works, Alderman James G. Woodward introduced a resolution which replaced the sitting seventeen-member school board with a new board comprising one member from each of the city's seven wards. Despite a r…
Did the Education Commissions Say Anything
Paul E. Peterson is the director of the Gov ernmental Studies program at Brookings. Be fore joining Brookings, he had been a professor of political science and education at the University of Chicago and chairman of that institution's Committee on Public Policy Studies. His books include City Limits and School Politics Chicago Style. He was the rapporteur for the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Federal Elementary and Sec ondary Education Poli…
The New Politics of Deficits
The Reagan administration's fiscal policies represent the boldest, yet most problematic, of all its efforts to transform the domestic agenda. By tolerating deficits on a scale unprecedented in peacetime history, the administration has been able to pursue simultaneously its commitment to a stronger defense and its pledge to cut the federal income tax rate. By tolerating these deficits, it has been able to create an austere political climate in whi…
Political science (60 works) · Law (41 works) · Sociology (38 works) · Politics (35 works) · Law (25 works) · Economics (24 works) · School Choice and Performance (21 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Public Administration (16 works) · Public Administration (13 works)